In the Guardian, Sally Rooney defends violent extremist group

Written by Georgia Leigha Gilholy

Much about Sally Rooney is impressive. Her books have smashed literary records, and their adaptations have been streaming sensations. Her debut novel was published when she was just 26. She is one of the most translated contemporary authors, and her works are available in 46 languages.

Hebrew, however, is no longer one of them. In 2021 she announced that her third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” would not be translated into the Jewish state’s lingua franca, as she refused to sell the translation rights to an Israeli publisher. Naturally, she has expressed no qualms about translation rights being sold in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and even a publishing house run by the Chinese Communist Party.

Still, Rooney has made no secret of her support for the antisemitic Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which uniquely singles out Israel for malign. So, it was no surprise when last week she decided to defend one of her pro-BDS bedfellows, the protest group Palestine Action (PA), after the British Government moved to proscribe them under terror laws following their sabotaging of a military site.

The star novelist’s elegy to the group, penned for The Guardian newspaper, stresses that it “does not pose any risk to the public”: this is far from the truth. Throughout the piece, Rooney glosses over PA’s violent tactics, while simultaneously claiming that the criminal acts they have participated in are justified. They cannot both pose “no risk” and engage in criminal activity that directly endangers others.

She proudly notes that they “haven’t killed anyone”, despite the fact they have certainly come close to doing so. Last August a police officer was rushed to hospital after being hit with a sledgehammer by one of their underlings.

The group are responsible for some 356 attacks across the UK, during some of which they have violently assaulted police and security. Their recent breach of Brize Norton, the largest Royal Air Force (RAF) site, caused 25 million pounds in damage to military jets. This is clearly a threat to British national security, which its armed forces are duty-bound to safeguard. Many affected staff and business owners are likely wondering what took the government so long.

Then there is the fact that PA co-founder Richard Barnard is already facing terror charges over alleged pro-Hamas statements at public rallies. On October 8th 2023, mere hours after Hamas’ brutal attack in Southern Israel, Richard told demonstrators in London: “When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood, we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.” Rooney ignores this. Since her piece was published last Sunday, another top PA activist Paul Shortt has been arrested under counter-terrorism laws.

Allegations that Iranian regime funding is being funneled toward the group have also come to light.

As Times columnist Melanie Philips writes: “[PA and similar factions] are part of an internationally coordinated strategy to terrorise Jews and to intimidate the police and government ministers into allowing them to do so by the threat of large-scale violence if they are thwarted.”

Though Rooney claims that proscribing PA is an “alarming curtailment of free speech”, UK law criminalises membership or support of proscribed terror groups — not criticisms of Israeli policies. She compares Palestine Action to the suffragettes and Martin Luther King. But, unlike them, this group does not oppose one particular policy, but urges Israel’s abolition entirely, and evidently regard any British police, defence workers, charities, and universities that might get in the way of this goal as mere collateral damage. Plenty of protest groups participate in the “mass peaceful protest” Rooney refers to, but PA is not one of them.

She also justifies her support for PA’s controversial, and often criminal, strategies based on flawed and biased assumptions about both Israel and the United Kingdom. She accuses Israel of committing genocide, a claim that we have already debunked in detail. Rooney also takes a page out of The Guardian’s usual playbook by uncritically repeating Hamas-provided casualty figures, even though they’ve been shown to be unreliable.

Also, in a manner that has become typical of many an anti-Israel scribbler, Rooney fails to dedicate so much as a sentence to Hamas’ October 7 massacre, which involved a deliberate campaign of rape, torture, and mass murder. She does, however, hold Israel responsible for a war Iran started with decades of proxy attacks, including the brutal 2023 onslaught she completely omits.

She writes that: “The UK provides military intelligence and arms to Israel, enabling genocide.” However, the UK’s arms exports to Israel are minor and highly regulated, and she offers no evidence for them having been used unlawfully.

She also repeats claims that Israeli forces have routinely “opened fire on Palestinians queuing for food.”

While deaths near aid sites have been widely reported, the circumstances remain highly contested, not the least because Hamas refuses to distinguish between civilian and military casualties. Israeli officials say many incidents involved firefights, crossfire, or stampedes, and in some documented cases they allege Hamas gunmen were present—sometimes firing on aid trucks or using civilians as shields, likely to cause chaos and film deaths.

Rooney ignores these complexities, as well as the argument that a Hamas surrender could end the war immediately. Even when the facts remain unclear, like scores of Guardian contributors before her: Rooney rushes to blame Israel regardless.

To us, Rooney’s approach is hypocritical, but makes sense within her political worldview.

In 1932, German jurist Carl Schmitt, who would later join the Nazi Party, famously argued that politics is ultimately about existential conflict: deciding whom you are willing to defend, and whom you are willing to oppose, even violently. His theory of the friend/enemy distinction defines the “friend” as those who share a political community’s values, and the “enemy” as any existential threat to that community. For Rooney, it seems that anyone aligned with the anti-Israel cause is a ‘friend’, whose actions can always be justified or shrugged off, no matter how horrific.

By contrast, the UK, Israel, and those affiliated with them are cast as the “enemy,” and thus legitimate targets of hostility, whether they be Israeli civilians or security workers on minimum wage.

It is also worth noting that Rooney is Irish and reportedly lives in Ireland, where there are no such plans to ban Palestine Action. Therefore the vague implication that she risks arrest from “the government” for backing PA is false. The UK government isn’t “her government” unless she decides to hop on a flight here.

Rooney is entitled to express her opinions—but perhaps she should keep them where they belong: in fiction.